You should be TENS unit maxxing

No offense to Dave Collum, but there needs to be a moratorium on him being a bitcoin podcast guest until he learns the basics.

Having recently read Jesse Meyers’ @Croesus_BTC potentially groundbreaking piece, “Once-in-a-Species”, on the relationship between human evolution and scare assets, I wanted to add a few thoughts on how his ideas may finally give us a definitive, perhaps even objective, answer to what “intrinsic value” really means when we talk about money. For those who have not read Meyers’ piece, a very short summary is that a particular genetic mutation in ancient hominids created modern humans by initiating changes to the structure of our brains, imbuing us with a desire for scarce goods, with scarcity itself being the operative, and not incidental, property. Meyers theorizes that this allowed humans to create and utilize money very early in our existence, which was the key to a level of social cooperation and flourishing beyond what other hominids such as Neanderthals had been capable of achieving in the same environs. He concludes by suggesting that bitcoin is the apex of scarce assets, making it a “once-in-a-species” achievement. It occurred to me when reading the essay that the long-standing misunderstanding over the supposed lack of intrinsic value in bitcoin, as opposed to gold (or any other physical asset used as a monetary medium), is a monetary cargo cult error. Yes, the analogies have arrived… A quick primer on cargo cults as they relate to this argument: During World War 2, Allied forces built airstrips in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and islands of Melanesia/Micronesia. They enlisted the aid of the locals, who commonly lived at a Stone Age level of technological development, to clear trees, move boulders, etc. The locals watched soldiers build huts, speak into radio microphones, and then, to their amazement, guide aircraft in from the skies. These cargo planes were filled with food and supplies of variety and abundance beyond anything the people of the jungle had ever seen, and some of it was shared with them as a thank you for their help. The entire experience must have been mind-blowing to an extent which we can not appreciate today, other than to note that it spawned a quasi-religion. For long after the Allied troops packed up and moved on, and even to this day, groups known as cargo cults try to replicate what their forefathers experienced: Clearing jungle, building “radio huts” where they adorn coconut shell headsets and speak into pretend microphones with instructions half-remembered over the generations. They sing songs recalling the names of troops who were stationed at the landing strips 80+ years ago, culminating in an attempt to call in the aircraft which will bring them treasure from the skies. To an observer from the First World, this all may seem comical. But it is NOT irrational. There is in fact a logic to what the cargo cult members are doing. They (or, by now, their ancestors) witnessed Western men taking these actions, saying these phrases, building these airstrips, and it really did result in aircraft full of valuable cargo appearing from the heavens. They believe that they are taking the same actions to achieve the same results. Their error is that they did not have enough understanding at the time to parse out the observable trappings of the makeshift airports from what was being communicated invisibly, and so were unable to comprehend the real hows & whys of the aircraft actually arriving at their remote homeland. It’s my contention that we in the modern world have been making a similar mistake in the discussion of the concept of intrinsic value as it relates to bitcoin vs gold. The standard argument, pun slightly intended, is that gold has value as a money because beyond that particular use, gold is a physical compound which can be used to make jewelry, gold is a superior electrical conductor, etc. These physical properties are baked-in to the gold atom itself, making them “intrinsic” and, in this version of the argument, making it a legitimate money because people have a permanent want for these properties. But this is the cargo cult mistake repeating itself. They saw the huts. They saw the equipment. They saw the runway. But they could not see the invisible information being broadcast hundreds of miles away into the skies, or understand the whole picture as to why the men flying those planes wanted to be there in the first place. Through the lens of “Once-in-a-Species”, it’s likely that we did not adopt gold (or shells, if we want to go back to an earlier epoch) as money because of anything in particular that we could do with it; because it was pretty, because it didn’t rust, because it could be shaped easily. It was valuable to us as humans because of it’s invisible, intangible property: we wanted it because it was scarce. This was the intrinsic property which actually mattered. Although gold’s characteristics were helpful for its use as a money (for example, corrosion-proof metal makes for superior coinage), they may not be the “intrinsic” reason why it was so highly valued in the first place. But those are the things we could see and we could touch, so like the cargo cultists, we misunderstood them to be the origin of value itself. It took the invention of bitcoin to strip away all that which was not essential and show us the invisible. If Meyers’ thesis is correct, what we call “intrinsic value” is not a physical property at all, but could more appropriately be categorized as a spiritual one. If a love of scarcity is built into the architecture of our brains, then the most eternally scarce thing will be the most desired money. It will not be a matter of taste or subject to change by debate or opinion or fashion. It simply IS, because human nature exists. If this is what enabled the leap from primitive hunter-gatherer to space traveller, it could be said that of all that is in our nature, the pursuit of scarcity may in fact be the must uniquely human.